An artist’s book, a work to be read, a journey through the history of painting, drawing on the collection of paintings at the Musée des beaux-arts de Rennes.
Isabelle Arthuis worked for four years with the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes and its collections, as well as with the residents of the Maurepas district, as part of the prefiguration of the museum's second site, due to open in early February 2025. The artist has worked with the teams and residents on a photographic project, drawing on the works of art as well as the personal histories of each participant, to develop a range of visual projects that will be presented to the public at the inauguration of the new museum in Maurepas. In particular, Isabelle Arthuis took detailed shots of hundreds of paintings in the museum. Fantaisies is a testament to this approach.
Rather than a catalogue, the artist wanted to design a real artist's book, a project she carried out with Lendroit éditions, in partnership with the Musée des beaux-arts de Rennes. Fantaisies, composed of hundreds of shots of pictorial works, invites us to travel to the heart of the history of art, textures and ways of painting. The artist offers us a disconcerting view of collections from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, playing with visual sequences and chromatic scales. Constructed like a film, Fantaisies delves into the details of both famous and little-known works, taking readers on a journey to the heart of painting that is as mysterious as it is spellbinding.
Isabelle Arthuis (born in 1969 in Le Mans) is a French artist who divides her time between France and Belgium. She has had numerous exhibitions abroad. She is present on the French art scene, in public collections, FRACs and art centres. She is very attached to Brittany, where this former student of the Beaux-arts in Rennes spends several months each year working, and has exhibited there on numerous occasions.
"Although she describes herself primarily as a photographer, Isabelle Arthuis produces images that take the form of silver prints, which she often prints herself, never hesitating to crop, turn or invert; very large posters, which she often puts up in public spaces, or installations in exhibition spaces; artists' books or slideshows, in which she plays with visual and chromatic continuations; and films, which she treats in an almost pictorialist way. The many subjects of her photographs and the way in which she looks at the world around her with her camera bring her closer to the realm of painting, in that she does not seek to portray an objectivity of reality but, on the contrary, an entirely assumed subjectivity in her relationship with the world that she shares with others. Seascapes or urban landscapes, portraits of fishermen or bodies in motion, photographs of paintings, frescoes or audiovisual images are all part of her work. It is 'the relationship to the world, more than the world itself, the interstice in which the gaze lies as a way of being' that is revealed in the treatment Isabelle Arthuis puts her photographs through between their publication or exhibition." (
Jean-Marc Huitorel, 2000)
